


Barret Bonden Ficlet Collection

by strawberryelfsp (berreh)



Category: Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Ficlet Collection, Gen, Implied Slash, Shippy Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-25
Updated: 2016-09-25
Packaged: 2018-08-17 03:36:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8128979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/berreh/pseuds/strawberryelfsp
Summary: Four character study pieces, combining book and movie canon.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I played Bonden in an RPG for a year or two, and consequently I wrote a lot of navel-gazing fics. These are my favorites.

**Valparaiso**

_November 13, 2003_

> _And every road I walked would take me down to the sea_  
>  _With every broken promise in my sack_  
>  _And every love would always send the ship of my heart_  
>  [Over the rolling sea](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zzuWh1Fcn0)

Sometimes, quiet on his back in the gently swaying hammock, Barrett could just turn his head enough to see a chink of night sky in the tiny square of the nearest portal. His portal — he had claimed it long ago for nights like this, had taken that swatch of clean and cool and open for his own in the cramped and breathless humor of the barracks. His by right, bought with a lifetime of sweat and salt and rope-burnt hands leaving bloody prints on the wheel. Sometimes, if he twisted just right, jostled for a better fit in the herring-barrel of sleeping sailors, he could lift his face enough to see the whole window. And if the gods were really in his favor, a star would be waiting for him there.

On a night like that, Barrett would stare and stare at that patch of brilliant black, and the crowded miasma around him would drop away until he could feel himself starting to lift like fog on the cliffs. He had no words to describe the feeling that single star sparked in his heart — he lacked the knowledge or grace for such things, he knew. All he could think was that the more he looked, the less he could feel the elbows in his ribs and the itching in his skin; the more the choked and fetid air faded and dissolved to cold salt wind, crisp and fresh. It was only during moments like that that the nights of his life began to resemble the days.

He'd been chasing it all his life, something finer and better than he had a right to touch, something just around the next bluff and just over the next swell. The chase thrilled his blood, and he never really asked for more than the searching of it, but still he sought and waited. Because once, long ago, someone had told him that everyone deserved to feel their heart swell with the joy of true beauty. Everyone had a right to search for something more.

Barrett had no eloquence to grasp such things, but sometimes, when he lay here and felt the night curl through the haze and breathe across his face, he remembered those words and thought that maybe he could imagine something more than this life he loved so much. Something even greater than the star that glimmered in his blinking eyes.

And sometimes, somewhere in those thoughts, he thought he could hear the faint sound of a cello drifting high and sweet from somewhere above.

 

* * *

 

**Translucent**

_January 12, 2004_

 

It’s a good face, Barrett thinks.

He doesn’t look at it often. Even if he were the sort to do so, it just isn’t possible. Any shaving mirror picked up at port is inevitably broken before half the men get a chance to use it. And it’s even more rare for the ship to calm herself long enough for the water in the rain barrels to go still and glassy, showing you a dim ghost of yourself if you peer into its depths. Barrett does exactly that, his hands still cupped in the warm water, distracted from the intent of washing his face by the surprise of actually seeing it. He stands motionless for a moment, watching the small ripples smooth out and blinking at the translucent face that stares back at him. It tilts a bit, looking at him curiously. He looks back.

The skin on this face is rough and dark; shaded with grime and thick with sun and wind, lined far heavier around the eyes than his age ought to allow. At least he reckons so – he hasn’t got much reference in that area. Most of the lads on board seem younger than he, even the few who aren’t. More fresh-faced, less weather-beaten. But few of these lads have been at sea as long as Barrett has: few of them learned to walk on the gun deck and had to gain their land legs; few of them have spent their entire lives in the salt and the sand, squinting at the horizon and facing the south wind until your skin goes numb. Barrett can feel the sea in his skin now, all the time, just under the surface. Salted like a herring, he thinks, and the face in the water smiles at the thought.

A woman once told him he had a lad’s smile. Granted, at that point she was merely trying to earn her pay, but the remark has stuck with Barrett for all these years. He wonders if it is true. He knows that when he laughs, others follow him. He knows that the Captain has accused him of “smirking” more than once (though he’s still not sure if that is a compliment or a chastisement). The memory makes his grin break out into a wide smile for a moment, and Barrett thinks it’s not a completely horrid sight. He’s got all his teeth, at any rate, which is rather surprising considering his landward hobbies. And he’s been trying to keep them clean, after the Doctor told him that it might prevent the toothache. It’s possible the lass wasn’t lying entirely, even if she was tucking his sixpence into her bodice as she spoke.

The scar beneath his eye deepens when he smiles, and his grin falters a little. The twist of it is vivid and harsh, a dark curling slash of shadow that tugs at the corner of his eyelid every time he blinks. He remembers sitting on a crate in Jamaica with his head bent back, blood in his eyes and rum in his nostrils, baring his teeth against the sting of the needle and hearing a voice say _you’re damn lucky you weren’t blinded, boyo... gonna make a right ugly scar, no mistake about that._ Barrett twitches his cheek, feeling the numbness there, and wonders if it is ugly. He hasn’t got much reference on that either. Not as nice as Lieutenant Pullings, but not quite as grisly as Blind Rob either. He reckons it was worth the prize money, and the tavern-keeper’s daughter checking up on him personally.

 _You’re lucky you weren’t blinded, boyo._ He was, at that. The last of the smile disappears, with a twinge of guilt. Barrett knows how foolish it is to risk his eyes at every port for a few quid and some free pints in the pub. His good eyes, the ones the Captain values so highly, the ones that can count the guns on a frigate a hundred yards before the officers can put down their lead. He can spot more stars at night than anyone on board, can pick out deadly shoals in deeper water, spot rocks in the fog and call noon a soul’s breath before the bell is struck. One misplaced fist could take that from him one day, if he’s not careful. Lucky thing he’s far too good to let that happen. The scar puckers a bit, and he thinks he knows what a smirk is now.

The warm water feels good on his hands, still a bit sore from last night’s watch. He wiggles his fingers a bit to loosen them. His eyes and smirk and scar scatter and fall away, and all he can see are his hands, thick and stiff in the water. He stares at the scars on his palms, years of rope burn through his gloves, opaque calluses on his fingers and swollen, gnarled joints. His hands he knows well, much more than the curious face that is slowly coming together again above them. Now he can see them both, his scarred palms open and his scarred face scowling down with knit brows and set mouth.

Foolish, this is, preening like a lad going to port for the first time. How he’s always teased them, the young ones scrubbing their necks and queuing their hair on the way into town. Pointless, all that. Barrett is not the sort for earrings and cockernonnies. He is quite content to be far more familiar with his hands than to give any thought to the face in the water. He was just curious, is all. He is what he is, and nothing more. He is what the sea has made him.

And that idea brings the small smile back to his laddish mouth, and makes the livid scar crinkle beneath his eyes. Young Warley he ain’t, but he ain’t Old Joe yet either. He’s neither fine nor scurvy, young nor old, but simply Barrett Bonden, salted herring of the HMS Surprise. His face is the face of a sailor.

It _is_ a good face, he thinks, and then breaks up the reflection for good as he stops dawdling and starts washing.

 

* * *

 

**Shadowboxer**

_January 20, 2004_

 

He always knew when they entered the tropics.

It wasn't the swinging compass needle or the turning of the sextant at noon, the creeping temperatures or the steadily shifting winds. It wasn't the tilting pattern of stars overhead or the climbing angle of the sun in its zenith. It wasn't the color of the sea, thawing from antarctic blue to Caribbean green as the waters warmed and churned with foam; and it wasn't the color of the sky, flaring into brilliant azure and streaked with blood red as the sun grew larger with each birth. It wasn't the trade of terns for gulls, or the spicy tang of palm and humidity replacing the bitterly sharp smell of ice and rope. It was none of these things, and it was all of them together.

His blood sang in this place, as open and loud as the the lads' shanties of the coming days of warm wine and warmer women. The song in his blood was wilder, wordless, chanting faster with the rising mercury and rushing louder with each removed piece of smothering coat and hat and glove. Something awoke within him at the 23rd Parallel -- something that lay dormant in the cold and came alive only here, coiling in his lungs and spreading out into his skin until his fingers curled and uncurled on the spokes, caressing, stroking out its pulse. It grew with every breath of hot wind, fueled by the sticky sweet air in his nostrils and stoking the warm glow of his soft green eyes into a barely-contained fire.

They knew land was in sight when he began to pace the gun deck, cracking his knuckles.

He did all of his fighting in the tropics.

 

* * *

 

**Sentry Duty**

_July 26, 2005_

 

Bonden is a lookout by nature. It’s a skill he is proud of, an honor he is grateful for, and a duty he takes as seriously as his oaths to his King and his Captain. It’s a quiet post, a still post. Bonden has grown adept at being still; he knows how to keep his eyes open and his mouth shut, to blend into the background and watch from the shadows and see without ever being seen. A lookout is an observer, a guardian from all dangers within and without: a protector, and if need be, a fighter. Bonden has been all of these things since the day he was born. And so, night after night, he keeps the best watch he can.

He watches now as the brass lamp flickers in the gloom, guttering each time the swaying ship shifts the oily air. He watches the shadows flutter across a sweat-slick chest, bare between the halves of an open banyan. He watches the light sparkle in the bottles littering the table, each one with its own scent mingling with the exotic smoke drifting across a flushed and trembling face.

Bonden can’t read well yet, but he can recognize most of the words written on the faded bottle labels, and he knows their purpose if not always their origin. He watches the dreams tumble and tangle behind the doctor’s drowsy, fluttering eyes. Sometimes the dreams are good; sometimes they are not. He can’t speak any of the languages that fall from those feverish, delirious lips, but he can tell when they are prayers and when they are curses. He can always see the moment when the haze grows too heavy and the tears flow too fast, and it is this moment he watches for most of all.

A good lookout knows how long to wait before sounding the alarm, and Bonden will never allow the rocks to get too close. He cannot fight smoke and air, nor answer calls that are not his to hear. So instead he gives the only service he can, the service that only he can. He watches. Being a lookout is Bonden’s nature, and all a man can be is what nature makes him.


End file.
